Michael Griggs

Guest Artist, Actor, Director

Michael Griggs has been working in the theater for the past thirty-seven years as a director, actor, administrator, presenter and educator. He is currently the Executive Director of Portland Taiko. He recently acted in Alice In Bed with Integrity Productions in Portland. He is the former Artistic Director of The New Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon (1985-89), and Bear Republic Theater of Santa Cruz, California (1974-85), and the Portland International Performance Festival (1991-2002). Recent productions include The Grey Zone at Theatre Vertigo, for which he won a Drammy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Directing, and Pedro Páramo at The Other Side Theatre. His Portland directing credits include Artists Repertory Theatre, Storefront Theatre, and Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. He directed The Diviners at Willamette University in 2002 and Iphigenia at Willamette University in 1990. He has acted in or directed more than 90 productions in regional professional, international and educational theatre, and is an adjunct faculty member in theater at Portland State University, Lewis & Clark College, University of Portland, and Linfield College. Most recently Michael played Old Man Winter in a National Nike Commercial.

In 1983 he received an Arts America fellowship to lecture and lead theater workshops in Mexico, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. That same year he was the recipient of an NEA Directing Fellowship to direct for El Teatro Campesino, where he developed an original script. He has received travel grants and fellowships for theater work in Latin America, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary and Poland.

In 1993 he received a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to do research on contemporary and traditional theater in Japan, and in 1994 he received a fellowship to attend a joint NEA/British-American Arts Association program for U.S. presenters in the U.K. In 1995 he received a national award for "innovative and creative programming" for his work on the Portland International Performance Festival from the National University Continuing Education Association.

He directed his own adaptations of The Dybbuk in Budapest, Hungary and Bialystok, Poland in 1996-97. That work was the inspiration for The Dybbuk Project, an installation and performance environment he created with Jack Falk and Chris Harris the summer of 1997. Also as a result of his experiences in eastern Europe, he was invited to participate in a "Conversation: East/West Collaborations in Theatre" at The Farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and to serve as a panelist on the peer grant panel for ArtsLink in Washington, D.C.